Rise of the Delta Variant Calls for Re-Doubling Efforts to Overcome Vaccine Hesitancy - Horowitz

Tuesday, July 13, 2021

Rob Horowitz, MINDSETTER™

 

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Tucker Carlson PHOTO: file

The emergence of the more transmissible Delta Variant as the dominant strain of COVID-19 in the United States has resulted in a surge in cases, hospitalizations and deaths, concentrated in the areas of the nation with low vaccination rates.  Nearly all the hospitalizations and deaths in the nation are occurring among the unvaccinated, according to an Associated Press( AP) analysis of government data from May. “Severe COVID-19 is now largely a disease of unvaccinated people,” reports AP.

As CDC Director Rochelle Walensky described the same situation at a recent White House briefing, “Preliminary data from several states over the last few months suggest that 99.5 percent of deaths from COVID-19 in the United States were in unvaccinated people. “Those deaths were preventable with a single, safe shot.” 

Going forward, hospitalizations and deaths remain preventable because the vaccinations are effective against the Delta Variant and the other variants that have emerged to date. As a result, the most important single task we have as a nation in this area is to persuade more of our fellow Americans to get vaccinated.  While a little more than 2-out-of-3 of us are, that leaves nearly 1-out-of-3 of us still at risk.  And with that many Americans still unvaccinated, this adds to the danger of new variants emerging which vaccinations may be less effective in combating.

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Despite the mounting and now overwhelming evidence for the value to the individual, their family members and to the community at large of getting vaccinated, the same right wing echo chamber replete with disinformation that has resulted in Trump supporters and Republicans significantly lagging the nation in vaccination rates, causing the new COVID- 19 spikes to be located mainly in Red states is now opposing the Biden administration's efforts to send “trusted messengers” door-to-door to persuade people to become vaccinated.

This usually positively perceived old-fashioned persuasion technique, enabling one-on-one conversations, used by both political parties, in door-to-door sales and on all sorts of issues, in the context of encouraging vaccinations  is viewed by some on the right as somehow sinister.  Laura Ingraham, for example, on her primetime Fox News Show last week, said, “This is creepy stuff.”  Mischaracterizing the Biden administration's effort, her colleague. Tucker Carlson took it even further, saying the Biden plan was an effort to “force people to take medicine they don’t want or need.” and calling it, the “greatest scandal in my lifetime so far.”  Governor Harry McMaster (R-SC) ordered his state health department not to cooperate with this administration initiative.

This distemper among some on the right about vaccinations is perhaps best illustrated by the loud applause vaccination skeptic Alex Berenson received at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) this past weekend, when he celebrated the fact that the Biden administration had fallen short of their vaccine goals.

The over-the-top anti-vaccination rhetoric and blatant misinformation could be almost amusing, if the consequences weren’t so dire. The negative feedback loop created by some of the loudest voices on the right are contributing to avoidable hospitalizations and deaths. It has led to a stark partisan divide on getting vaccinated: “86 percent of Democrats have received at least one vaccine shot compared with 45 percent of Republicans. Only 6 percent of Democrats said they are not likely to get vaccinated, compared with 47 percent of Republicans," finds a recent Washington Post/ABC News poll.

Vaccine hesitancy in sub-groups can build on itself as the kind of misinformation that is pervasive in right wing traditional and social media results in like-minded peers and friends—an important contributing factor to decisions we make--failing to provide encouragement to get vaccinated and often, even recommending against it. A recent American Enterprise Institute Poll is instructive: “Republicans were far less likely than Democrats in this survey to have received any encouragement from friends or family members to get vaccinated (28 percent versus 55 percent, respectively), wrote Daniel Cox, the director of the survey, in an opinion piece published by FiveThirtyEight. “In fact, one in three Republicans reported that friends or family had advised them not to get the vaccine or that they had received mixed messages about the importance of getting one.”

One-on-one conversations at a person’s door in which trusted members of the community work to persuade people are time-consuming. but effective in puncturing the negative feedback loop.  A full-scale door-to-door effort in Alabama, organized by the Biden administration, has produced promising results. 

These door-to-door efforts, however, must be amplified by primary care physicians-who most people trust-steadfastly encouraging their patients to be vaccinated and spending the time needed to answer any questions that patients that remain hesitant have.  Religious leaders also still have an important role to play in encouraging their congregants to get a shot. And there is a still a role for Republican elected officials. It was encouraging to see Republican governors, including Asa Hutchinson (AK), Jim Justice (WV) and Spencer Cox (UT), in some of the states seeing a spike in hospitalizations do exactly that over the weekend as well as push back on the attacks on the door-to-door persuasion efforts.

Governor Hutchinson described the high stakes involved: “We are in a race,” And if we stopped right here, and we didn’t get greater percent of our population vaccinated, then we’re going to have trouble in the next school year and over the winter. So, we want to get ahead of that curve. Working very hard to do that.”

It would sure help if Tucker Carlson, Laura Ingraham and the rest of the right-wing media echo chamber would stop making Hutchinson’s job more difficult. If for no other reason, one would think, they would do it, because it would keep more of their viewers from getting sick or dying. The cold hard truth, however, is at least so far, that hasn’t been incentive enough.

 

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Rob Horowitz is a strategic and communications consultant who provides general consulting, public relations, direct mail services and polling for national and state issue organizations, various non-profits, businesses, and elected officials and candidates. He is an Adjunct Professor of Political Science at the University of Rhode Island.

 

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